mechanism design Mechanism design is a field in economics and game theory that takes an objectives-first approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives, toward desired objectives, in strategic settings, where players act rationally. Because it starts a ...

, implementability is a property of a

social choice Social choice theory or social choice is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual opinions, preferences, interests, or welfares to reach a ''collective decision'' or ''social welfare'' in some sense.Amartya Sen (2008). "Soci ...

function. It means that there is an

incentive-compatible A mechanism is called incentive-compatible (IC) if every participant can achieve the best outcome to themselves just by acting according to their true preferences. There are several different degrees of incentive-compatibility: * The stronger ...

mechanism that attains ("implements") this function. There are several degrees of implementability, corresponding to the different degrees of incentive-compatibility, e.g: * A function is dominant-strategy implementable if it is attainable by a mechanism which is dominant-strategy-incentive-compatible (also called

strategyproof In game theory, an asymmetric game where players have private information is said to be strategy-proof or strategyproof (SP) if it is a weakly-dominant strategy for every player to reveal his/her private information, i.e. given no information about ...

). * A function is Bayesian-Nash implementable if it is attainable by a mechanism which is Bayesian-Nash-incentive-compatible. See for a recent reference. In some textbooks, the entire field of mechanism design is called Implementation theory.Martin J. Osborne & Ariel Rubinstein: A Course in Game Theory (1994).

References

{{reflist Mechanism design